Hi there.
A few months back I deployed around 60 “Aruba AP-505” for a larger Senior Housing Company. Now WiFi isn’t really my area of expertise but this project wasn’t exactly a complex one.
The requirements where rather simple. We had around 5 or 6 SSIDs, one of them had to be configured with “WPA2 Enterprise” for the authentication. Which means we need a radius server.
The other SSIDs where assigned to different vlans. We have no dynamic assignments or anything similarly fancy. Everything was very static.
The primary reason for the WiFi was for the staff to be able to walk around the building with their tablets, without loosing connectivity. The remaining networks where for visitors, the residents and a few special cases like the building service staff.
Now back to the Access Points. One neat feature the Aruba AP-300 and above have (other vendors have this as well, of course), is the option to run them controllerless or better knows as clustered. This allows us to first deploy a single AP and configure it, which than pushes the configuration to all the other APs that you connect to the network.
This lowers the entry cost, since the customer does not have to buy a hardware controller and additional licenses. It also makes deploying the wireless network very easy. Admittedly I didn’t deploy that many wlan hardware controllers in my time ( a few from Netgear, Lancom and ZyXEL ) so maybe they only felt more difficult. Don’t know.
I had another project with the same APs. It’s actually the same project as the “Aruba 8360 configuration” post. We also have a few SSIDs and Radius. The only real difference is, that I will use the “device-profile” option in the Aruba 2930F to automate the port tagging for the Access Points.
Anyway, enough rambling.
Let’s start.
First steps, getting into the device
First we need to attach the Access Point the the network. The device will grab an IP via DHCP. Either look for it on the DHCP server or check the LLDP information on your switch. The APs should transmit it.
Here is a example from an Aruba 2930F in our office. I changed the MAC address.
switch(config)# show lldp info remote-device 3
LLDP Remote Device Information Detail
Local Port : 3
ChassisType : mac-address
ChassisId : fc7ff1-000000
PortType : mac-address
PortId : fc 7f f1 00 00 00
SysName : Marketing [fc:7f:f1:00:00:00]
System Descr : ArubaOS (MODEL: 515), Version Aruba IAP
PortDescr : eth0
Pvid :
System Capabilities Supported : bridge, wlan-access-point
System Capabilities Enabled : wlan-access-point
Remote Management Address
Type : ipv4
Address : 172.16.20.247
Poe Plus Information Detail
Poe Device Type : Type2 PD
Power Source : Only PSE
Power Priority : Unknown
PD Requested Power Value : 25.5 Watts
PSE Allocated Power Value : 25.5 Watts
As you can see, the IP address has also been transmitted.
Now enter the address into your browser with the port 4343
https://172.16.20.247:4343
accept the certificate and you should see the login page.
The username is “admin” and the password will be the serial number of your device. Get this from the label on the back of the access point.
Once you are in, you will see an overview of you current wifi network. Here a example of our internal system.
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